A Fragment of Life: An Autobiography

Copyright 2014 Hebe Morgan.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3124-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3122-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3123-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014905276

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Contents

The problems…

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Also by Barbara Yates Rothwell:

1994:    THE BOY FROM THE HULKS

Juvenile Australian historical fiction. Published by Longman Cheshire, Melbourne.

1998:   DUTCH POINT

General Australian historical fiction. Published privately in London.

2004:   COULTER VALLEY

   Family saga. Published by Trafford Publishing in Canada.

2005:   KLARA

   Fact and fiction; the story of a Jewish refugee in England.

   Trafford Publishing.

2006:   RIPPLE IN THE REEDS

   Fiction: wartime traumas in Europe; a new life in Australia.

   Trafford Publishing.

2007:   NO TIME FOR PITY

Short stories: a selection from 40 years of writing. Published by Trafford Publishing.

2009:   STANDFAST

2nd collection of short stories. Trafford Publishing.

2011:   THE BOY FROM THE HULKS

(2nd edition with sequel). Trafford Publishing.

2012:   AN EMPTY BOTTLE

(3rd collection of short stories). Trafford Publishing.

Remembering past years spent with my husband,

Derek Moore Morgan, Mus. D.,

and the past, present and future with my family,

Cynthia, Patrick, Helen, Keith, Alison and Fiona,

grandchildren and great-grandchildren,

of whom I am so proud.

The problems…

There are certain problems to be solved before embarking on the writing of one’s life story. The chief ones are—just how much of one’s life will one reveal, and does it matter anyway?

I thought about this fairly deeply before starting. Did I want all my little secrets out in the open, available for discussion at coffee mornings and in the shopping centres? The quick answer was ‘no’. Did this embargo invalidate the things that were to be laid out for public view? I didn’t think so.

As this ‘fragment’ has been snipped and sewn into a pattern I feel comfortable with—and as it is, as any family-based memoir must be, created to enlarge the family’s understanding of where they have come from, and so help them to understand where they may be going—I have come to believe that the kind of autobiography that ‘tells all’ and ‘pulls no punches’ has been written for the wrong reasons. There is no rule that says ‘warts and all’!

There is in any case so much in any creative person’s life that is worth recording! Just putting down the facts of what one hopes one has achieved—in my case, for eighty-five years (and counting)—has proved to use up a lot of pages! I hope this ‘fragment of my life’ will feel like a chat by the fireside, or perhaps a lazy day on the beach with a friend.

Whatever your feelings as readers, it has been the greatest fun to do.

FRAGMENT OF LIFE

Started and finished

at the request of my family

‘I live in a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill-health, and other evils of life, by mirth; being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles—but much more so, when he laughs, that it adds something to this Fragment of Life.’

Dedication in Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)

1

I t seems to be traditional to ask someone recalling their long life if they can bring to mind their earliest memory. Mine goes back to when I was probably about two years old, sitting in my high chair in the kitchen, wedged behind the table in a corner. That’s it, folks! I don’t think I was screaming, or refusing my rice pudding, or in any way having a tantrum. I’m just there, and I have no recollection of anyone else. It may be deeply meaningful, but I doubt it.

My next memory is when I was just three. I am standing in front of my father, who is squatting on the floor and dressing me in my Chilprufe vest and knickers. He says I have a baby sister. This is quite surprising. She and Mummy are in the bedroom and I have to be quiet. My sister was called Rosemary, a name we somehow reduced to Rosebud until she became too old for that.

I started school at Chasely School, Ruislip, when I was four-and-a-half—the normal school age in England at that time. The first day—or at least part of it—is burnt into my memory. I was put at a small table in what I now remember as a bay window, and given a book to write in. It had numbers in it, and I had to copy them out. That was fine, no problems. But I was extremely daunted by the other children, whom I found very threatening, though in honesty I cannot recall that anyone ever did anything unpleasant to me. I was a very shy child, a fact that will surprise my many friends today.

In 1934 my brother Philip arrived on the scene. I was sent off to stay with my grandmother Rothwell while this event was happening; my cousin Pat, a few months older than I was, lived with Grandma, and in due course she and I came back to my home in north London. Grandma lived in Lancashire, and I have always had a real affection for that part of the world.

Home, for me, now contained a small baby and—horrors!—a nurse, as well as my parents and Rosemary. I took a strong dislike to the nurse, who seemed to come between me and my mother. At the far end of the garden, as yet uncleared of weeds, was a large patch of sorrel, and I gathered the seeds and made a cup of tea—well, I put some in my toy teapot and poured warm water on it—and offered it to Nurse, who really annoyed me by saying ‘no thank you, dear’. I think I had hoped it would make her sick—or at least go away. I wonder if there are many five-year-old murderers about. And could this be a link with the crime stories I started writing half a century later?

Pat and I stood at the foot of my mother’s bed. Somewhere, no doubt, the baby snuffled, but I don’t remember it. We wondered why Mummy was in bed. Pat, always more outgoing than I in those days, said: ‘What’s the reason for the cause of the poorliness, Auntie Lily?’—a saying that has gone down in the annals of my family ever since, though Pat doesn’t remember it, and was much amused when I told her about it a few years ago.

Pat’s early history is worth recording. Her mother, Lottie, was my mother’s sister, and she and her husband Norman went to live in Canada with their small sons, Norman and Brian, in the latter half of the 1920s.

Pat was born in Alberta in August 1928, seven months before I arrived in Lancashire. Her home was in a small town, Red Deer, and in the winter after her birth they were snowed in. At this difficult moment Lottie became ill with pneumonia, and they were unable to get her to hospital. She died when Pat was a few months old.

Grandma and Grandpa Rothwell undertook to raise the children, easing a situation that would have been very difficult for Norman, still trying to establish himself. The three little ones were brought home by ship in the care of a nurse. ‘Babes of bulldog breed’ was the newspaper headline announcing their safe arrival.

In due course, Norman remarried; he and Marjorie had three more children: and Norman junior, Brian and Pat grew up in the heart of the Rothwell family—a busy household, with two young uncles, Tom and James, also living at home.

By the time Philip arrived I had had my tonsils removed, a horrendous operation more in keeping with 19th century medicine than 20th. I developed pyelitis, a condition that has left me vulnerable for the rest of my life to ‘waterworks’ problems. Worse than that, it left me with a phobia involving mild suffocation and the fear of soft things over my head, as a result of extremely poor management of the pre-op situation, combined with a fear of being thought naughty which meant that I never told anyone, including my parents, how awful it had been. It is ironic that my father, then and for the rest of his working life, was employed at the Ministry of Health!

By the time I was about six, of course, I began to pile up experiences, and the memories are too many to relate (though perhaps I should confess that Tudor Harper kissed me behind the classroom door. He was an older man, almost seven, and I told my mother when I got home. ‘Oh, did he!’ she said rather meaningfully—and probably smothering a laugh—and I had my first lesson in What One Should Not Tell One’s Mother). But my big crush was on my teacher, Miss Norman. When she left I tore upstairs as soon as I got home, shut myself in the toilet and cried very hard. School was never quite the same again.

Ickenham High School, when I was eight, mercifully only lasted a year. I went to school on the underground train—which was above ground by the time it got to us—from Eastcote to Ickenham in the variable care of the ‘big girls’, who were all of twelve years old and ignored us kids completely. To use the train I had to have a season ticket, and I suppose it is quite surprising that in that whole year I never lost it. I developed a fear, not of trains, but of the gap between the train and the platform. If one is determined to spend one’s life in various forms of fear there are always plenty of opportunities. I think this one arose from the story that a woman had fallen under the train a short while before, and both her legs had been cut off. Whether this was true or not I have no idea, but the ‘big girls’ made a meaty story out of it, and had us, or me at least, properly scared.

I was also terrified of the headmistress, who had a way of taking misbehaving children into her study and ‘slippering’ them. I don’t know whose slipper she used. I only know that I lived with the knowledge that I was going to do something wrong, however hard I tried not to, and the slipper would be mine! The day we were playing netball and my friend gave me a lolly—which if course was absolutely forbidden (as nearly everything except breathing and eating was)—and I was caught! almost brought my life to a shuddering end. Fortunately, nothing and happened—but I knew it would, one day.

I have wondered why I was so timid in those days. With a good home and loving parents I should have had more confidence in myself. I don’t recall ever being ‘put down’ at home. Mum and Dad were encouraging, expecting me to do my best, but not reacting negatively if I failed at something. Although my fearfulness slowly waned over the years I was still very sensitive even in my early teens, and very aware of that terrible thing, being laughed at. I’m thankful that marriage and a family gave me greater confidence. Fear is all right in its place, but not when it inhibits growth.

I remember the old king, George V, dying in 1936. A solemn voice on the wireless said, ‘The King’s life is drawing peacefully to its close,’ which to me, at 7, was very poignant. We all wore black armbands, which would seem quite odd these days—except on the footy field. Then there was a new king, and the deep respect in which the royal family had been held began to erode. The new king, Edward VIII, had been much loved as a young prince, but it soon looked as if the grown-ups were not too happy about what was happening. It’s amazing to think, in these days when the Internet has made it impossible to keep anything under wraps, that the British press—unlike the American—made little mention of Edward’s ‘goings-on’. He was a bit of a womaniser, with a penchant for married women, whose husbands apparently managed to cope with the royal blessings being bestowed on their wives.

Edward was never crowned. Mrs Wallis Simpson, American divorcée, got him first; and though she may well have seen herself as being the first American queen of Great Britain, there was no way she would get past the politicians of that era, who were unitedly against her. Edward abdicated—thank goodness!—and he and Mrs S, now a duchess since he had been given the title of Duke of Windsor, left for France and were never again of any importance in British history.

Schoolkids, of whom I was one, sang about this great turmoil:

Hark the herald angels sing, Mrs Simpson’s pinched our king!

If she does not give him back We will give her the sack!

Decades later, in Australia, I discovered that on the other side of the planet the children sang the same ditty!

I say ‘thank goodness!’ in particular because the Windsors were quite smitten by Hitler and his activities in Germany. Many people, including me, believe that he would have been prepared to accept a role under Germany as a puppet king. That, of course, would have been disastrous. We would have become part of a German empire, and that was unthinkable. Fortunately, his brother who became (rather against his will) George VI, and Elizabeth who in our time was the much admired Queen Mother, were inspirational during the Second World War, and together with Winston Churchill dragged us through the horrors to eventual, if weary, victory.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Philip was proving to have health problems which at the age of 4 gave him pneumonia. He was asthmatic; pneumonia in those days was very frequently a killer, and I imagine that my parents were deeply afraid of what was going to be the outcome. This is in the pre-antibiotic days, and there was very little that could be done, except to wait for ‘the crisis’, a moment when the body finally decided whether the fever would break or the patient would die. Very often they did the latter. Thankfully, on this occasion the fever broke and Philip slowly began to mend. But he had to learn to walk again.

My memory tells me that Rosemary and I were also very ill that winter, but I don’t know what it was—perhaps bronchitis, which I was very liable to suffer until I was in my 20s. At any rate, I suspect Mum had a dreadful winter; and when we were on the way to health again she said in despair to the doctor, ‘What am I going to do with these children?’ He said something which none of us could possibly have known would change the pattern of our lives for ever. ‘Take them to live in the country for six months and run wild.’ What a doctor!

At that time we lived in Eastcote, near to Harrow in NW London, in a new estate of houses built after World War I. I dimly recall Dad saying that our house cost £1250. We had moved there in 1931. It was a good house: 4 bedrooms, lounge and dining rooms, bathroom and toilet, good-sized kitchen and scullery. In 2008, when I was with Rosemary, we went to find the house, and the young woman who lived there very kindly let us go inside and have a look at it after Rosemary had told her that she was born there. It was what in England is called semi-detached, and all the houses in quite a long street were exactly the same design; fortunately quite a good one. Next door to us was the dentist.

Life in the country must have been quite an amazing concept for my parents, brought up as they were in the smoke of Lancashire. By the next April we were settled for six months in a rather eccentric bungalow, surrounded by young forest and seemingly endless areas of heather, on the lower slopes of the South Downs at Storrington in Sussex. From the top of my favourite tree (I was a dedicated tree climber) I could see the Downs. We were on an unmade lane, sandy, with homes scattered about out of sight of each other. It was idyllic, and as a family we were never quite the same again.

I was 9, Rosemary 6 and Philip 4. As a cure it was not entirely successful: a few years later Philip once again escaped with his life from another bout of pneumonia, Rosemary had asthma but got over it with treatment, and I usually had annual attacks of severe bronchitis until antibiotics came in and I grew out of it. There were times when I dared not lie down in bed because I would choke, and Mum must have got heartily sick of looking after us. I don’t know where the chest problems came from, whether they were ‘in the genes’ or what. I just know that I lost an awful lot of school time as a result.

But what joy Storrington was! How did Mum and Dad get it past the authorities? We had no schooling from April to October 1938, and we did no lessons at home! I heartily recommend it.

One of the spin-offs from this super holiday—during which, of course, Dad had to go up by train to London from Pulborough every working day, but didn’t seem to mind it in the least—was that when it was coming to an end they apparently agreed that they never wanted to live in the suburbs again. We had all been spoilt, I’m afraid. So they began to look for somewhere within a half-hour or so of London by train. And in due course they settled on Dorking, as being conveniently close to necessities—shops, church, cinema, doctors and so on—but with countryside all around.

So we moved to Dorking at the end of 1938. Rosemary and Philip started school at Stanway, just up the road from us, and I went to Charlton House School, which was not as grand as it sounds, at the other end of the town. Many interesting things were to happen to us as a result of this move.

2

M y parents were Lancashire-born. As far back as I know, both sides of the family, Rothwells and Blakes, were Salford or Manchester people. Very few people outside the English Midlands have heard of Salford, which has long been swallowed up by its larger neighbour, Manchester, and is presumably now a part of Greater Manchester. But it was once a separate entity, and Salford people were proud of their heritage, grimy and smoky though it might be. And Salford is in fact a city in its own right, even if it is a bit obscured by the Manchester twin.

Southerners have always seen that area as something to be avoided at all costs. It is the ‘industrial north’, with cotton mills and pitheads and, always, the smoke and grime. But I used to love to go there as a child. It was so very different from the green and pleasant land which was Dorking. I felt there was something a bit romantic about the fact that under my feet were coal and salt mines, that land occasionally subsided into sink holes, that the sky was seldom anything but a pale grey, and that all the city buildings were apparently created out of black stone. I know better now, of course. The great clean-up that has overtaken all the British cities has revealed clean, pale stone, and the skies are now quite blue.

When I was a teenager I used to go with Pat and her youth club mates down to a particular place in Sedgely Park, where my Grandpa Blake lived, and ‘hang out’ (yes, we used to) at the milk bar. There was a place there with a parapet over a wide, flat area where there were the great wheels of the pitheads, slowly turning to indicate that there were men underground. This area extended into a kind of mist after a considerable distance, a mist which I failed to realise was smog. Many years later, driving through during a holiday sometime after we had emigrated, I found myself at that same parapet. The wheels had stopped turning, but they were still there—just no mining. And in the distance, where that mist had been, was a distant view of hills, presumably the Pennines. They had been there all the time, but I had never seen them until the clean air act came into force.

Mum and Dad were both born in 1901. Dad had a fine school and university career, much of it, I was told by Mum, paid for by scholarships. He was a student, first, at Grecian Street School before going on to Manchester Grammar School, where he had success not only scholastically but on the soccer field, and was eventually school captain of soccer. In about 1919 he went up to Queen’s College, Oxford and read Classics, emerging in 1922 with a BA degree. He was fortunate to be too young to get involved in the Great War—as it was always known until the 1939 conflict began—and too old for WWII. But he was in the OTC at MGS, (Officer Training Corps); so presumably he learnt how to hold a rifle and to march. He also played soccer at Oxford, though he was never a ‘blue’ (the university team). He and Mum were engaged in 1922 when they were both 21. Grandpa Blake wasn’t too happy about this, thinking they were much too young. According to Mum, he thought 25 was the proper age to get engaged—because he was 25 when he was engaged! But Dad had fallen for Mum when they were teenagers. He said he saw her, wearing a red tam-o-shanter (a sort of beret), walking down the road when she was about 14. Mum snorted when I told her this and said, ‘I never had a red tam-o-shanter!’ That just leaves a mystery. Perhaps he saw someone else and thought it was Mum! I didn’t like to suggest that to him. I don’t believe he ever looked at another woman while Mum was alive.

She, meanwhile, had finished schooling (also at Grecian Street. I wonder if they met then when they were small. Probably not, because girls and boys were carefully segregated). She was 14, and had never enjoyed school much. At the beginning of the year in which she was fourteen (1915) she told her father, Grandpa Rothwell, that she didn’t want to go back to school. He said she had to finish the year, and I don’t think he was open to argument. By the end of the year, however, she had begun to enjoy it, and said she wanted to stay on. But he said, ‘No, you wanted to leave, and that’s what you’re going to do!’

It seems unnecessarily brutal. But in those days there was still considerable pressure against having girls educated beyond a certain level. And it’s worth remembering that Grandpa had had to leave school early, possibly when he was 10, which would have been about 1880 or so, and had done extremely well without a proper education. So Mum went to work, and a dim memory tells me that it was the ribbon department in a large Manchester or Salford store. She was a highly intelligent woman, and I have sometimes wondered what her future would have been if she had been allowed to do, for instance, as Dad did, and had gone on to a good senior school and the university.

A performance skill in those days was reciting—poems, monologues and so on—and Mum studied elocution with a teacher in the city. Eventually this would become part of the leisure activities for her and Dad—Dad played the piano, Mum recited, and Uncle Tom, Uncle Jack Rothwell (Great-uncle John’s son) and Auntie Win (Dad’s younger sister) sang. As I understand it, they had a sort of concert party which went around performing, probably in local church halls. Tom had an excellent bass voice and a great sense of humour; Win’s voice was a rather fluttery soprano; I think Jack sang tenor. Tom and Jack did a very nice line in The Two Gendarmes—I remember hearing them at a family party. Both Tom and Win (and possibly Jack) were in the Halle Chorus, Manchester’s pride, which performed with the Halle Orchestra, one of Britain’s major orchestras.

Mum’s great moment was when she achieved the London College of Music diploma in elocution. In fact, she gained two diplomas from the LCM, and would probably have done well teaching. But her moment of glory was also a moment of real disappointment, one which she never quite got over, and would talk about to me many years later. She took her diploma to show her mother, Grandma Rothwell. Pass mark was 70%, and she just got over—about 72%. It doesn’t matter with a diploma whether you pass excellently or just scrape by—you have the letters after your name! Unfortunately, Grandma Rothwell looked at the marks and said, ‘You only just got it, then.’ Poor Mum! I believe she must have been devastated for the hurt to remain so long. She really deserved praise, especially since she was the first person in the Rothwell family to get a diploma or anything like one.

There is an old north-country saying: ‘clogs to clogs in three generations’. Grandpa Rothwell wore clogs as a boy, as did his brothers. His father was Tom Rothwell—when Grandpa was a young man he went down to the canal where his father had worked as a bargee or (the family hopes because it sounds better) a barge owner. But I think it was probably the former, because when Grandpa asked around to see if anyone remembered his father they said, ‘Old drunken Tom—yes, we remember him!’ It gives some reasonable idea why the entire Rothwell family was strictly teetotal. Who knows what they all had to put up with while he was ‘in his cups’?

Not only was he a drinker, but he was living with a woman called Miss Prince to whom (let it be whispered) he was not married. He already had a wife somewhere in the city area, and he was Miss Prince’s lodger. My cousin Ken Rothwell in Devon has done a fair amount of research into the family tree, and he has unearthed the census details for several years that cover the period Great-grandpa was ‘lodging’ with Miss Prince. Over those years, while she was listed as the owner and head of the household and Tom was her lodger, they had four sons. John was the eldest, then Tom, then George and Herbert. ‘Old’ Tom died in 1884, and in due course Miss Prince—my great-grandmother—went to live with my grandparents, Tom and Charlotte.

I know this because she was there when my mother was a young woman. Great-grandma had well-developed selective hearing, which meant she couldn’t hear what you wanted her to, but could always hear what you didn’t want her to. And, according to Mum, she drank whisky out of a tea-cup! It must have been a real trial to my grandparents, who, like all Methodists at that time, were teetotal. She died in 1924, when my mother would have been 23.

To be illegitimate at that time in history would not have been advisable. My mother told me that Grandpa didn’t know his parents were not married until he went to the local labour exchange and was called out under the name ‘Tom Prince’. All these stories are anecdotal, having gone through several generations before they arrived at me; but there is clearly much truth in them. Poor young Tom must have been fairly devastated to know the reality behind his parents’ relationship.

John and Tom were young men with energy and ambition. George and Herbert, it seems, went along in the jet stream. It’s said that the two older boys worked for a local grocer or corner shop as delivery boys. Before long they were becoming business men in their own right. Grandpa Tom married Charlotte Shearman in the late 1890s, and they set up house with a brother; I don’t know if he was hers or his.

But I cannot leave those early, struggling days without recounting the story of Great-grandpa’s funeral. This was another of the stories my mother told me, and it does ring true when one realises that Mary Prince must have been a very strong-willed woman, unconcerned about what people thought.

Uncle John, in 1884, would have been about 13, I believe. When his father died and they were waiting for the cortège to arrive, a coach (probably a horse-drawn cab) drew up across the road. You can visualise, perhaps, a street of terrace houses with plenty of net curtains to twitch. In the coach were the legal Mrs Rothwell and her completely legal daughter. One assumes that they were waiting to take their rightful places as chief mourners.

Great-grandma Prince, my mother said, told ‘the boy’ (who would presumably be the oldest, therefore John) to go down to the undertakers and tell them not to come just yet. Anyone who tried that today would miss the whole ceremony! So off John went, and Mrs Rothwell sat—and sat—and at last gave up and drove away. I like to think that the call of nature became too much. And Miss Prince sent ‘the boy’ off to tell the undertakers, ‘You can come now!’ Game, set and match, I would say.

John and Tom forged ahead. They developed an impressively large wholesale grocery company, J&T Rothwell, which, by the time we children came along, was established in Salford, Altrincham and Northwich. I don’t remember ever going to the latter two warehouses, but it was always exciting to go the Salford one. It was the smell as much as anything that I can remember, a mixture of smoked bacon, cheese, coffee, tea and other delights that hit you as soon as you entered. I was told that in pre-war days they were the largest importers of sugar in the north of England.

As children we were rather proud of Grandpa’s Special Sticky Butter! Our name for it, not the one on the packet. At Christmas we were able to order things from the Rothwell catalogue, which was a great excitement. One year, when I was about 7, I was given a presentation box of sweets, and snuggling in the middle was a box camera—a real one! I used that camera for the next 12 years, and it took excellent pictures. It’s an interesting comment on today’s expectations that Dad told me not to waste the film because it cost 1/3d for a new one.

Dad then had the 1931 Humber, a car large enough for a family of five—and incidentally the car in which I learnt to drive several years later. It had originally been Grandpa Rothwell’s. We would draw up outside the warehouse, which was situated in the Salford slums, and immediately a swarm of poorly dressed children would be there, ready to scramble all over the car if they could get away with it. It must have looked a most elegant vehicle to them.

Two stories come back to me about the area around the warehouse. When a local child died (which was a fairly common occurrence) the family would come to the warehouse and ask for a tea chest—to make a coffin to bury the child in. And there is a very anecdotal tale of one of the younger brothers being discovered at the back door of the warehouse, cracking eggs—because they could be sold to the locals very cheap. Grandma Rothwell, who spent much time nursing her younger son, James, through illnesses, asked her doctor why it was that her son, so carefully nurtured, was always being ill, while the children in the slums around the warehouse seemed able to run about ill-clad and barefoot without harm. The doctor said, ‘When those children are ill, they die!’

There is perhaps a third story about the slums, though this was not to happen until many years later. Bombs on Salford during WWII blew these dreadful houses to pieces. One of the few things one could thank Hitler for. Later, when the remains of the slums were razed by demolition companies, rats in hundreds ran out of the ruins. Of course, when we visited the warehouse as children it all seemed perfectly normal that some children should swan around in a large Humber while others lived in squalor. I am thankful that our eyes have been opened, at least to the extent that we find such poverty unacceptable. Maybe one day we shall actually find the balance.

John and Tom, with what must have been a fairly basic education, seem to have been unstoppable. By the 1920s they were respected members of society, comfortably off, with growing families. Sons of the two families went almost automatically into the business, and they lived in good homes. What a tremendous boost to their egos when Uncle John became mayor of Salford in the early ’20s! As a child, my mother told me, she had been ticked off for misbehaving by being told she would never go to the Mayor’s Ball. Well—as a very attractive and well-dressed young woman, she did! For many years there was a large portrait on our lounge wall of Uncle John in his mayoral robes, looking austere and solemn. But behind that portraiture there must have been a small boy who was saying, ‘I said I would—and I did!’ Good on him!

When Mum and Dad moved back to the north in the ’60s they discussed what to do with the picture. (I wondered why they had it in the first place—surely it should have gone to John’s family?) Eventually they decided to give it to Salford City Council, so I hope it is still there somewhere on a wall, along with all the other celebrities. It’s interesting to know that Uncle Tom, Grandpa’s son, was a Salford City Councillor for some years until his death in 1963.

He was also the Liberal candidate for the High Peak of Derbyshire during several parliamentary elections. It was not a good time to be a Liberal candidate—the Party was something of a spent force. I was told that when he left school the headmaster said to him: ‘Well, Rothwell, no doubt one day we shall see you sweeping the streets’. Hardly an encouraging send-off into adult life! But it does seem that Rothwells react well to other people’s negativity.

I have two memories of Uncle John. One was when I was quite young, before the war. Pat and I were at the warehouse, and when we had poked and pried and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves we were taken to see Uncle, who was sitting behind his desk and looking fairly severe. ‘I have a present for you,’ he said. ‘Something to keep your treasures in.’ He pronounced it ‘tres-suers’. I was quite excited. He took from his drawer a toffee tin, one of those with a picture of a kitten or a puppy on it, and handed it to me. When, later, I opened it, it was empty! Apparently I had to find my own treasures.

The other memory is of sitting at the tea table with him and Aunt Dorothy, Pat and Rosemary and Philip, during the later stages of the war in 1944. It was the first time I had had to choose between peanut butter and ‘real’ butter. If I chose the latter I could have jam. If the former, no jam. Or it may have been the other way round. Big decision!

In 1925 my mother was invited to go on what became a world tour with Uncle John, Aunt Annie (his first wife and mother of his children), and cousin Florence. The occasion was the marriage of Uncle’s daughter Anne, who was a doctor and medical missionary in China. Mum and Florence were to be bridesmaids.

In those days when commercial flying was still in its infancy it was a journey by train and ship. They travelled across America, Uncle visiting canning factories on the way, making use of a unique opportunity. They also went to Canada, and in our childhood days we heard about Lake Louise and Banff and other exotic names. Mum wrote a diary, which Rosemary has computerised and which gives details of the trip.

We also heard about the young men who chatted them up. She told me once that if she hadn’t been engaged to Dad she might well have fallen for one of these young men. I can remember saying, with a sense of shock, ‘But what would have happened to me?’ She said, ‘Well, you’d have been someone different, wouldn’t you?’ It created a mystery in my mind which still causes me to think how haphazard this life is that we think is so firmly embedded in our own personal histories.

After North America they went on to China. But China at that time was somewhat unsafe for foreigners, and they were advised to go elsewhere for the ceremony. So the wedding eventually took place in Japan.

Anne was marrying the Rev Max Gratton, also a Methodist missionary. In due course they produced three children: Dorothy, Joyce and John. And, like so many others who had dedicated their lives to the ‘foreign field’, they had to remove themselves when the war began and the Japanese made their way down through China.

The girls went to a girls’ school in England. John eventually became a pilot—and still is, in his seventies. Dorothy studied medicine, like her mother, and became a high-ranking gynaecologist in South Wales, where she still lives. Although I never knew her more than very slightly when we were young, she has now stayed with me several times and I have stayed with her in the lovely Welsh countryside. John I met only recently. He and his wife Sheila live in the delightfully-named Brandy-Hole Lane. So in my old age I am collecting relatives.